Tuesday 1 May 2012

Original Lesson 17: Make your own Shape Family and Dream Beach Hut

Make your own Shape Family

During this lesson, the objective was for students to understand the changing and stable characteristics of a shape when it is enlarged or minimised in size. To achieve this, I handed out nets to students, one small version and one large version of the same shape. For advanced students, I handed out harder nets such as a dodecahedron, whereas the at-risk students received cubes, with the middle groups allocated cones, prisms and pyramids. Prior to the students commencing work on actually making their nets into 3D shapes, I asked them to guess what their shape would look like and what would change and stay the same between their small and big net.

A great site for obtaining nets of shapes is: available here. Samples of handouts below:





After students made their shapes, they measured the shapes' edges with a ruler, its angles with a protractor and counted its faces, vertices and edges. As a class, we discussed our findings and made conclusions about what stays the same and what changes when all 3D shapes are enlarged or minimised.

Make your dream beach hut

Again, this is a theft from my supervising teacher so all credit to Sue for this one. This session advanced in difficulty from the last (Make your own Shape Family) as students were now required to draw their own net of a cube and a square based pyramid. The end objective was to create their own dream beach hut. Alternatively, you could allow students to choose their own creation and draw any nets accordingly but only if you think they are ready for that extra element of complexity.


After it dried, students decorated their beach huts by sticking painted icy pole sticks around its faces. The learning objective was both shape and measurement/angles related, as students needed to ensure all their edges on the cube net were the same length and the angles on their pyramid were the same, otherwise a sad fate awaited their miserable beach shack.

Some students required a fair bit of scaffolding in this and the need for accuracy was discussed from the lesson's commencement with reference to large-scale architecture. For instance, if a builder constructs a skyscraper poorly, such that each level is measured incorrectly by give or take 5cm, across a 50 floor building that could mean the different of an entire 2.5 metres and seriously undermine the structural integrity of the whole construction.


Worked Sample of the Shape Hunt (see Original Lesson 16: Shapes)

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